Speech prepared for the Benevolent Paternal Order of Elks Flag Day Ceremony
Freehold, New Jersey
June 13, 1982

 

We all remember what the colors of the American flag once were said to mean. Every year, our teachers explained that red stood for the blood of patriotic Americans who sacrifice their lives in the struggle for independence; white stood for purity, blue for justice and devotion. We were told that George Washington himself set down the meaning of the red, white, and blue, shortly after our country’s birth.

Today, historians insist that the story is only a story, a myth. George Washington really said nothing about the meaning of our flag–no more than he chopped down a cherry tree or spent time in the thousand places that now claim, “George Washington slept here.” As for the colors of our flag, they came from the British flag. The American colonists wanted to claim, as they did in the Declaration of Independence, that they were the ones who were true patriots devoted to the ideals of Britain, that George III was the rebel, the one who wilfully violated the right of Englishmen overseas, provoking patriotic resistance. The thirteen stripes symbolized the unity, but also the independence, of each American colony: a unity in resistance to what the Declaration calls the King’s attempt to impose “an absolute tyranny over these states.”

That is what historians tell us, and I have no reason to doubt their research, as far as it goes. Historians love to debunk myths, and we shouldn’t deny them their favorite recreation. But most of us are not historians, and when someone erases our flag’s meaning, we wonder how we can replace, and with what.

Fortunately, we are Americans, and Americans are lucky. The United States Congress implied as much when they described our flag’s “thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.” Throughout recorded history, constellations have symbolized destiny arranged by the power of Heaven. In associating our states with a constellation, the American founders expressed their hope that fortune would be on our side, and when it comes to recovering the meaning of our flag, it is.

I say that because historical research also tells us that the red, white, and blue of the British flag have traditional, symbolic meanings much like those we once ascribed to the same colors on ours. If the founders merely imitated the flag of their old homeland, their imitation was a lucky one. Traditionally, red does stand for the courage and sacrifice that sometimes means shedding blood so that our country can live. Today, as much as ever, in a world that still has not won freedom from fear courage is our country’s life-blood.

Traditionally, white does stand for purity, and also for the wisdom that comes to those who defend it, which resist the many things that corrupt. Wisdom rests on the moderation of men and women who both understand and withstand the liberty Americans enjoy. Today, as much as ever.

Finally, blue does stand for justice, and for devotion. We still hear the expression `true blue,’ and we associate blue with the sky–that is, in symbolic terms, with Heaven, the traditional source of the justice that commands our devotion.

All of these colors, and their meanings, reinforce one another. Courage without wisdom, moderation, and justice does not know what to defend. Wisdom, moderation, and justice without courage cannot defend themselves. The American founders knew that, and their lives proved it. If they really did adopt red, white, and blue without knowing what those colors symbolize, they accidentally affirmed the virtues that formed the constellation of their own excellence. And that excellence helped to assure the destiny of these united states, the “new constellation” in world politics.

New Jersey’s only president, Woodrow Wilson, wrote: “This flag, which we honor and under which we serve, is the emblem of our unity, our power, our thought and purpose as a nation. It has no other character than that which we give it from generation to generation. The choice is ours.” As we have seen, Wilson was wrong. Our flag does represent a constellation of meanings beyond whatever meaning one generation may try to give it. Its meaning was given to us. The purpose of our political union was to secure our unalienable right, endowed to all human beings by their Creator. We can choose to defend the republic for which our flag stands, we can choose to make its intended purpose and meaning our own. We can also reject that original purpose, as Wilson wants us to do, give it some new character.

Each generation of Americans must choose to accept or reject the courage, wisdom, moderation, and justice seen in the character of the American founders, given political form in the Constitution they designed and symbolized in our national life by our flag. It is a choice that no one makes only `once and for all.’ In each life, each of us chooses, many times. If enough of us make the right choices, this union of states will endure in liberty. I hope that we will make those choices. By coming here today, you tell me that you share this hope, beneath the American flag.

 

2016 NOTE: I wrote this talk for New Jersey State Senator Thomas Gagliano. He had me re-write it and he delivered the new version. This one was never delivered.

The World–As It Is, and As It Can Be

Article published March 1980

 

President Jimmy Carter came into office in January 1977 believing that the policy of détente with the Soviet Union could be continued and extended. The Soviets had other plans, proceeding with the modernization of their military forces and invading Afghanistan in 1979, thereby moving a step closer to the oil resources of the Persian Gulf–oil resources that resource-rich Russia did not need for itself, but which were crucial to the economies of the United States and western Europe.

President Carter aspires, belatedly, to realism in foreign policy. Three years ago he was telling the American people that the “Cold War” was over, and that our fear of communism was “inordinate.” True, Mr. Carter was only echoing the wishful thinking of countless experts on international relations, such as his national security adviser Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski, a reputed hawk. Let us not minimize the fact that politicians are very dependent on such experts for their understanding of the character methods, an d objectives of the Soviet Union. Détente was endorsed by intellectuals before it became the dogma of statesmen.

Given Mr. Carter’s recent turnaround, have Americans finally awakened from their dogmatic slumber?

In his State of the Union Message, Mr. Carter told the American people that “to be secure, we must face the world as it is,” and the world as it is contains an aggressive, powerful Soviet Union. “Now, as during the last three-and-a-half decades,” the U. S.-Soviet relationship “is the most critical factor in determining whether the world will live in peace or be engulfed in global conflict.” The Soviets, Mr. Carter now sees, are the people with the guns, and guns bring raw materials to those who know how to shoot. If the Soviets could block Arab shipments of oil to the free world, the U. S. would enter a depression; the European and Japanese economies would collapse. He might have added that Soviet control of the Persian Gulf would give Russia a position of almost unassailable world dominance.

Carter now proposes to threaten to fight if the Soviets go further; limit U. S.-Soviet commerce; boycott the Moscow Olympics; strengthen U. S. and allied armed forces (including the revival of draft registration, if not the draft itself); continue attempts at independence from oversea energy sources; and, of course, more diplomacy.

The reaction to this rather mild list of actions surprises only those unacquainted with the cowardice of the American let and the hypocrisy of American presidential candidates. Several of the latter complained about the embargo of grain to the Soviet Union; the former complained of “Cold War II” and the “immorality” of sacrificing blood for oil. The fact that even voters in the farm state of Iowa approve of the grain embargo, along with the fact that a large majority of voters favor draft registration, must have disconcerted the many political pros who had imagined otherwise. Unfortunately, fact rarely disconcert the American left or American presidential candidates.

The appeasement lobby ignores the fact that Soviet encroachment on Mideast oil fields would enable the Kremlin to threaten the United States with considerably more harm than any self-imposed restrictions on commerce. These same moralists who would rather see the Soviet spill oil than blood also overlook the lives of millions of non-Americans around the world–present and potential victims of Soviet aggression. When America was doing the killing in Vietnam, was this not termed `racist’ and `genocidal’? Evidently, there is moralism and then there is moralism.

Far from being too `tough,’ President Carter hasn’t done enough to punish the Soviets and to deter future attacks. The first thing he should have done was to sack the purblind advisers who eased him into this mess–starting with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Brzezinski, both of whom supposed that we had seen “the end of ideology” and, with it, the need to store away anti-communism as a relic of the Cold War.

Governor Ronald Reagan has offered a more coherent geopolitical policy. He observes that the Soviets, too have vulnerable spots. Cuba is one of them; he suggests a blockade. We add that no one should overlook Granada, which is Cuba’s own satellite, even as Cuba is Soviet Russia’s. And Angola, where Jonas Savimbi’s troops beg for support in their fight against Kremlin-backed Marxists, ought to be added to the list. We can do more to back the anti-Soviet guerrillas in Afghanistan, too.

We also suggest that the U. S. work harder at undermining another Kremlin client, the Palestine LIberation Organization, which not only backed Khomeini’s coup against the Shah of Iran but also supported the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Closing down the PLO office in Washington is the very least that could be done. Helping the Christian forces in Lebanon against the PLO there is another.

In view of the Soviet use of embassies for spying (300 agents operate out of the United Nations delegation alone), the U. S. should require the Soviets to reduce the size of their embassy staff in Washington. The U. S. should also consider closing Soviet consulates. It’s unlikely that U. S. consulates in Russia give America as much information about the Soviets as the Soviets get in America from theirs.

Furthermore, we should actively engage in subversion within the Soviet Union itself. The New York-based political commentator Barry Farber has long advocated the use of language as a tool in this regard. The Soviets, he has remarked, train their agents to speak not only excellent English but excellent Arabic, Chinese, Bantu, etc. The more the West can do to damage Soviet interests within its polyglot empire, the less energy the Kremlin will have for projects abroad.

America may or may not need to return to conscription. If so, there must be no deferments of service for college students this time, as there were during the 1950s an 1960s. College students–many of whom went to college only to avoid the draft–stewed in their own juice while on campus, worrying about having to go into the army, and perhaps into war. Because they had time on their hands and fear in their minds, they engaged in numerous disruptive and hysterical demonstrations during the period of the Vietnam War–until, of course, President Nixon ended the draft and with it the commotion. If youths are to be conscripted, let it be before college; then, once they arrive there, they will be more likely to concentrate on books, beer and other traditional collegiate matters.

But the immediate problem has nothing to do with the draft and training more spies. American `conventional’ military weakness requires us to lean more heavily on our nuclear weapons as a deterrent than we might like. Carter should allow it to be known that a Soviet attempt to dominate the Persian Gulf will `force’ him to use one or more submarine-launched ballistic missiles to destroy Iranian oilfields and kill Soviet troops in the area. This threat would buy some time until `conventional’ forces can be strengthened.

Given pending Soviet upgrades in its own nuclear arsenal, by 1982 a nuclear threat will not impress the Kremlin so much. For that reason, the strategic nuclear strength of the U. S. must also be increased sufficiently so as to minimize the length of what has been called the `window of vulnerability’ now foreseen to extend from 1982 to 1985.Along with the deployment of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons America must not neglect research and development. While Defense Secretary Harold Brown has noted correctly that military leaders can become “entranced” with technology thereby wasting money contriving complex but fragile weapons systems, technology, rightly used, also saves money and yields more efficient weapons. And technological advance, not clever diplomacy, will be the thing that eventually renders nuclear weapons obsolete.

With a modernized weapons systems–strategic and tactical, nuclear and ‘conventional’–at hand, America will have the makings of a sound military. And if American soldiers serve a country that also subverts its adversary with the same enthusiasm and skill with which its adversary attempts to subvert us, if they serve a country that uses patient diplomacy and intelligent propaganda to mobilize world opinion against the world’s real enemy, and if they serve a country that combines economic strength with political cohesion, they will find themselves on he winning side, again.

 

By far the most controversial proposal here was the recommendation that the United States threaten the Soviets with the use of submarine-launched ballistic missiles against targets in Iran if the Soviets invaded that country from their bases in Afghanistan. Unknown to the general public at that time, the Carter Administration had made a conceptually similar but morally and tactically much better move. At one point, when Soviet troop movements did indeed indicate a possible invasion across the Iranian border, Carter signaled his willingness to use tactical nuclear weapons against any troops that did so. Whereas submarine-launched ballistic missiles are powerful weapons that would cause immense damage to civilian populations, tactical nuclear weapons are battlefield weapons that can be aimed at enemy soldiers. Their use was much more plausible and morally defensible than the one I proposed. Both ideas were intended to deter the Soviets in a circumstance where they had substantial ground troops and America did not.  

By the end of the year, Carter had lost his bid for re-election to Governor Reagan, who then implemented a tougher line toward the Soviet Union and did indeed put the U. S. on what I called “the winning side” in the Cold War.

A Reply to James Reston’s Critique
June 1978

Exiled from his native Russia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered the commencement speech at Harvard University on June 8, 1978. Solzhenitsyn spoke of the decline of courage in Western societies generally and in the United States in particular, vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. He argued that the security and contentment of Americans had made them morally soft; their freedom had decayed into self-indulgence. Meanwhile, Soviet tyranny had toughened Russians, and these two moral changes, taken together, put into question the survival of genuine freedom everywhere.

New York Times columnist James Reston issued an indignant reply to the speech. He was especially exercised by Solzhenitsyn’s charge that America’s “capitulation” in the face of the military advance of communist North Vietnamese forces against South Vietnam three years earlier had been “hasty.” “Hasty?” he exclaimed: “After a generation of slaughter?” Solzhenitsyn probably referred to the U. S. Congress’s refusal to grant additional military funding to South Vietnam after American troops had withdrawn, rather than the whole course of the war. But in my response to Reston I addressed another aspect of his critique. 

 

Mr. Reston sees “a fundamental contradiction” in Solzhenitsyn’s address at Harvard, a contradiction between the assertion that “only moral criteria can help the West against Communism’s strategy” and the assertion that “only American military power and willpower” could have stopped the advance of Communism in Southeast Asia.

No contradiction: Solzhenitsyn sees that willpower and morality intersect, that there are some moralities that tend to soften human character and others that tend to toughen it. His argument that the nation, Russia, is spiritually stronger than ours doesn’t in any way endorse the Soviet government. The point is rather that the Russians have been forced to become morally tougher because their adversary, the government, is more overtly evil, whereas in the United States evil takes a more seductive, pleasing form and thus eases us into shallower lives.

In his high-flown praise of American’s “spiritual heritage” as the cause of our withdrawal from Vietnam, Mr. Reston overlooks the fear of our supposedly exemplary anti-war protesters–what Hobbes called the fear of violent death; “belief in the sanctity of individual human life,” indeed.

Solzhenitsyn would remind us that some things surpass individual human life in their sanctity. The fact that it is possible to hold up the individual life’s sanctity as the American summum bonum demonstrates Solzhenitsyn’s point about American moral shallowness more conclusively than anything Solzhenitsyn said.

As for military power, it is necessary on another level, the level of practice. Only moral toughness can bring a decent country to use military power, but moral toughness without power can find itself imprisoned by tyrants. Or, in a different way, by purveyors of intellectual fashion.

 

Unsurprisingly, the Times didn’t publish this. But James Reston replied in a letter to me dated June 20: 

Dear Mr. Morrisey,

Thank you for your opinion on my Solzhenitsyn column.

There really is so much controversy on what he said that it would take more time than I have to go into all the details. On reflection, there is rather more in your interpretation of the effects of suffering than in mine.

Sincerely,

James Reston

The spirit of kind magnanimity in that note touches me even today, nearly forty years after receiving it.